“I have a great idea for a business book, but when I wrote it, I had only 17,000 words. How do I expand to a full-length book?” Jay was frustrated when he asked me that question. We talked about his idea. It was solid, helpful, and grew out of his experience with clients. Jay thought he’d expressed the idea » Read More
Category: Better Writing
Better Writing: Catching Your Own Mistakes
At one point in my checkered career, I was the Director of Development for a seminary. Part of my job was to go out into the highways and byways and bring in donations of time, talent, and treasure. I’m not a big fan of trooping along the highways and byways. So I decided to send out a letter that would let » Read More
Taking Stock
The New Year is a great time to take stock of your life and your writing. Here’s how Dan Pink describes this period in his excellent book, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. “The first day of the year is what social scientists call a ‘temporal landmark.’ Just as human beings rely on » Read More
Better Writing: 5 Easy Tips to Improve Your Writing
If you’re serious about writing well, you probably learned you can always improve. Here are five simple techniques that have worked for me and my clients. Read Your Writing Aloud It’s hard to spot errors in copy that you’ve just written. We tend to see what we think we wrote. Reading your writing aloud » Read More
The Long Game of Writing
I didn’t know whether to puke or sit down and have a good cry or both. I was going through some old boxes, and I found manuscripts for a couple of the first articles I wrote over 50 years ago. Gosh, they were bad! It took a couple of minutes to realize that those articles illustrated something very good. They » Read More